Mourning for America

                                                                   

Mourning President Carter, a good and decent man whose long post-presidency life set an unparalleled example of good works and selflessness.

Mourning those who died at the hands of the insurrectionists of January 6, four years ago.

Mourning the rise of the oligarchy and angry men in every walk of life.

Mourning the considerable peril our country faces in the four years ahead of us, as a vindictive and profoundly ignorant little man seeks retribution for slights--real or imagined and hustles to pay off the billionaires who have put him in office.

Mourning my loss of faith in my fellow citizens . . . and those friends I thought I knew . . .

Looking East, 7:30 AM

 

Ordinary Things

 The Tampa cousins (both painters) have nudged me into attempting more drawing from life (rather than photos as is my wont.) This is the mug that follows me around all day--usually with hot water, sometimes tea, occasionally grog (hot water, rum, lemon.)

Next up, my grandmother's biscuit cutter and spatulas. I don't use these--but can't get rid of them. Maybe painting them will allow me to let go.

                                                    

Josie Does Sewing and Organizes a Zip Line

It snowed today but school was out anyway and I wa up at Meema and Grumpy's.  First (after pancakes) I did some sewing with the sewing kit Sandy gave me for Christmas. 

It was fun and there was a big plastic needle that didn't hurt if I stuck myself.  I finished two projects, and they looked really good. We are sending one to Sandy and one to my cousin Fay who was here for New Year's. Silly Meema forgot to get pictures of them.

Jenny wondered what I was doing.

                                                                                

                                        After lunch, I snuggled with Jenny and Otter and watched some videos.             

Then I decided the cords on the roll-up shades in the dining room would be perfect zip lines for the Castle People and made a sign NOW HIRING to get Meema and Grumpy to be lifeguards for the zip lines.
                                                                                 

I slid the Castle People down the zip lines. Meema kept yelling WATCH OUT ! and DANGER! I told her that wasn't what lifeguards do but it was hard to make her listen.

                                              Carmen loved riding the zip line.

Memory

                                                                             

This old beauty showed up on a Face Book group about historic Tampa and I was delighted to see it. Back in the Fifties, my orphaned first cousins Ken and Logan lived there with their maternal grandmother Lula Logan-later Lula Broneer when she married an archaeologist.

I visited my cousins now and then. They had a pool table and a pinball machine in the front parlor, and Logan did his best to show me the elements of pool and pinball.

I wish I'd paid more attention to that amazing house. I mainly remember being awestruck at the two outdoor stairs. It had once been a place of some magnificence--do I remember a defunct fountain in the front yard?

Looking at this picture, I wonderful if it began as a straightforward two-story house and then acquired those two spectacular wings, fore and aft.

I'm pretty sure it's given way now to a high rise. The large lot on the Bayshore would have been irresistible to a developer. 

I kinda don't even want to know. 

Facing the New Year

There are still blue skies and good people. May we look for the beauty and the good that is around us and mirror that, rather than the ugliness and hate that threaten. 

May we keep hope alive, even with the smallest acts of kindness. 

May we persevere.

 

Rabbit, Rabbit, (Hare, Hare)

                                               And a Happy New Year to all!

Bringing thr Music

Visiting cousins brought Josie a karaoke machine! 

Delight ensued.

 

Up Close

 

Gingerbread Cake and Cranberry Coulis

An excellent dessert, leftover from the Christmas feast. A moist gingerbread cake topped with a cranberry coulis and accompanied by homemade cinnamon ice cream--all the work of my DIL Aileen.

Yum!

 

Outside of Time

                                                                           

      

 The day never really dawned, as such. Misty, gray, chilly--it wasn't till about 3:30 that a brush of sun showed on the slopes across the river. And that was short-lived.

The day matched this weird space between Christmas and New Year's--I always find it difficult to feel like it's 'real' time. Instead, it feels like a floating, tenuous non-reality. 

I did manage to pay a few bills (there's some reality for you) and write thank you notes, as well as reading a novel Claui gave me for Christmas.

It was a "blind date" novel in a plain brown wrapper, labeled as a thriller. My Darling Girl by Jennifer McMahon turned out to be a riveting read for me, partly because much of it recalled my own experience with a difficult, Jekyll and Hyde sort of mother. (Though, I hasten to add, nothing as disturbing as the novel,)

What begins like a Hallmark movie, devolves into psychological terror. And it left me a little stunned--and, suitable to the day--a bit outside of time. 

Hiraeth--A Repost

                                                                      

Hiraeth (heer-eyeth) is a wonderfully evocative Welch word. It's defined as a homesickness for a place to which you can never return; nostalgia or yearning for the lost places of your past. 

The picture above, taken from Google Earth (2007), was the home of my maternal grandparents. The size of the yard is distorted -- it looks absolutely huge -- but in a way that's appropriate because in my earliest memories, it was huge -- a great, green grassy empire that was all mine. 

When I was very young and my father was in that mysterious place known as ‘overseas,’ my mother and I lived for a time with my grandparents. And later, when my father came home from WWII, I continued to spend time here.  My family lived just around the corner but I spent a great deal of time at my grandparents' house -- I even had my own bedroom.

The new owners seem to have made very few changes -- at least when this picture was taken. I can look at the picture and remember so many different times -- much like Miss Birdie's hall of doors I posted about on Christmas Eve 2014. (HERE) But here the memories are all good. 

My earliest memory is of lying in a crib between the two big beds in the master bedroom upstairs while my grandfather in his bed held my left hand while my grandmother in hers held my right . . . and the fresh smell of pillows put to air in the sunny eastern windows . . .  and later when my younger brother and I were both there for the night, how we would sit on little stools in the big bedroom and eat apples while we listened to the Lone Ranger on the radio . . .

Above the garage was a bare room, in the late Forties and early Fifties home to a ping pong table and my grandmother's treadle sewing machine --  remodeled in the early Sixties into an apartment where I lived while John was stationed in Japan a year after we were married.

I rode my bike along that sidewalk when I was a gawky pre-teen and later my grandfather took my older son for walks there. I looked out those windows to the right of the front door and saw John (only a classmate and acquaintance at the time (8th grade or thereabouts) driving his go-cart on the sidewalk across the street.

And from the breakfast room windows to the left of the garage, I would watch for John when he came in his Model A to pick me up during our senior year of high school. And our wedding reception was held here and we ran down the front steps in a flurry of rice in 1963 -- just as my parents had in 1941. . .

Of course the memories of this beloved place have crept into my writing. A Christmas post a few years back about an incident when I was young (HERE) surely contributed to Miss Birdie's Christmas memory (though without the bitter part.) 

And while I do, indeed, have hiraeth for this lost paradise, I know that I'm where I belong and where I want to be. But I still love prowling that hall of memories. . .

Whew!